| Curvature perturbation spectrum from false vacuum inflation (2008) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| In the inflationary cosmology it occurs frequently that the inflaton field is trapped in a local, transient minimum with non-zero vacuum energy. The difficulty regarding the curvature perturbation produced during such a stage is that classically the inflaton does not move so that the comoving hypersurfaces are not well defined at linear order in the scalar field perturbation. In this paper, assuming a mechanism of trapping which resembles a high temperature correction to the potential, we explicitly calculate for the first time the resulting power spectrum of the curvature perturbation by evaluating the quantum two-point correlation function directly. The spectrum is steeply blue with the spectral index n_R = 4.. Comment: (v1) 17 pages, no figure; (v2) 18 pages, more clarifications and discussions added, to appear in JCAP | |||||||||
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